LLOYD COLE (PART ONE)

IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS LLOYD COLE WILL BE PLAYING FIVE SHOWS IN THE UK WITH GLASGOW OUTFIT THE LEOPARDS AS HIS BACKING MUSICIANS. THESE DAYS COLE MOST OFTEN PERFORMS AS WHAT HE SOMEWHAT ARCHLY DESCRIBES AS A SOLO “FOLK-SINGER”, AND THIS HANDFUL OF BAND SHOWS REPRESENTS THE FIRST TIME IN MANY YEARS THAT HIS EXTENSIVE BACK CATALOGUE HAS BEEN GIVEN ‘THE FULL TREATMENT’.

Last year an impressively curated box set collected together almost all of the work by erudite 1980s lit-poppers The Commotions. At the time of its release Cole and The Mouth Magazine podcasted at length about it (listen again, here). When we signed off, Cole described plans for a further box set, concentrating on the four albums which followed. His solo debut LLOYD COLE (sometimes referred to as X) was released in early 1990; a strong, confident and liberated rock record which was run through with a sense of geography. It was written and recorded in New York, the city Cole had moved to in 1989 to escape London and his recent past. Later came the songwriter / rock band hybrid DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE (1991), the experimental and misunderstood (though, to some, miscalculated) BAD VIBES (1993) and the ‘comeback’ of sorts LOVE STORY (in 1995). Here, in Part One of an extensive three part interview in which Cole discusses these first four solo albums and what came after, we focus on X and DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE…

WE PODCASTED A YEAR AGO, TALKING ABOUT THE LLOYD COLE AND THE COMMOTIONS BOX SET, AND I REMEMBER WE SIGNED OFF WITH THE NEWS THERE WAS LIKELY TO BE A FOLLOW-UP COVERING THE FIRST FOUR SOLO ALBUMS… BUT BEFORE WE TALK ABOUT THOSE, THERE’S A BURNING QUESTION… WHEN WE DID THAT PODCAST, LITERALLY MINUTES BEFORE WE STARTED RECORDING YOU’D JUST HAD A NEW FRIDGE DELIVERED… HOW HAS IT INTEGRATED INTO COLE FAMILY LIFE? Excellent question. It’s been rubbish. We’ve had to have the fridge mechanic, the engineer, around twice – he was here just a couple of days ago…. It stopped making ice recently, and so we’ve had to go to the grocery store to buy ice to put into the freezer part of it. It’s possibly the worst fridge I’ve ever owned…

WE’RE BEING LIGHT-HEARTED BUT I DO WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT FAMILY LIFE – OR AT LEAST MENTION FAMILY LIFE IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR WORK… WHEN THE COMMOTIONS SPLIT IN 1989 YOU MADE YOUR WAY TO AMERICA AND, IN FACT, YOU’VE REMAINED THERE. YOU MARRIED AN AMERICAN GIRL, YOU RAISED TWO SONS… I THINK IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT THE USA CHANGED YOUR LIFE…I think wherever you live changes your life. You can’t not be influenced by your surroundings. Wherever you are has an effect on you. There was no grand plan. I’m here in America very much more by accident than by design. I went to New York to take a break from things and New York had seemed, on the few times I’d visited there, like a place that invigorated me. I wanted to get up early and get things done when I was in New York, so I thought “Let’s see what happens if I go and live there for a little while”. The initial plan was to live there only for maybe six months, and see what happens… During that six months I met my wife, and we liked being in New York and we just sort of fell into living there. I probably still thought I’d move back to Europe at some point… But that just never happened.

THAT FIRST SOLO RECORD SEEMED TO BE VERY MUCH ‘OF NEW YORK’ OR AT LEAST REFLECT SOMETHING OF THE CITY. IN THE PROMO YOU WERE OFTEN PHOTOGRAPHED ON THE SUBWAY OR UNDER ICONIC BRIDGES OR WHEREVER… THIS WAS IN 1989 / ’90, SO A DECADE OR MORE BEFORE 9/11… WHAT WAS NEW YORK LIKE TO YOU, BACK THEN?I was twenty seven years old when I went to New York and, looking back at things, I think I probably thought of myself as a fairly cosmopolitan twenty seven year old who’d been around the world a couple of times with a rock ‘n’ roll band. But, really, I’d had a very sheltered life up to that point. You go round the world a couple of times but you have a tour manager looking after you. You don’t even have to check yourself into the hotels; someone else does that stuff. So when I found myself on my own in New York I perhaps was somewhat overawed.

BY THE PLACE, OR BY BEING OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE OF BAND LIFE?
By the sort of romantic nature of my situation. I probably did get a little carried away trying to integrate myself into the grittier aspects of the city. I think it all looks a little bit funny in restrospect… I think I look a little bit like a boy dressed up as a man.

ISN’T THAT JUST BEING TWENTY SEVEN, THOUGH?Yeah, sure. And I think some of the songs are… a little naïve. I was joking about this with someone recently, saying that if I ever wrote my memoir that chapter would be called A YOUNG PERSON’S IDEA OF DARKNESS, ha ha…

FOR ME THAT ALBUM RAISED THE NOTION OF THE LISTENER NO LONGER WANTING TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU IN A LIBRARY OR COFFEE HOUSE DISCUSSING LITERATURE, FILMS AND SO ON BUT INSTEAD HANGING OUT WITH YOU IN NEW YORK; SHOOTING POOL, RIDING THE SUBWAY AND… DRINKING A LOT… IT FEELS LIKE YOUR NEW YORK PERIOD MAY HAVE BEEN A BIT OF A LOST WEEKEND – BUT IT CAN’T ALWAYS HAVE BEEN LIKE THAT?
No, no. It wasn’t at all. I was incredibly prolific the first couple of years I was there. I did the mathematics of this recently – I wrote more songs in the first six months in New York than I did in the last two years I was in London. Change – especially change of one’s environment – tends to be a stimulus. It tends to jolt one’s creativity. That’s why you see so many writers moving around. Once we go somewhere and get comfortable, for creative reasons we want to go some place where we’re not so comfortable…

BUT YOU SETTLED DOWN… I raised a family, yeah. Once you’re doing that you really don’t want to drag your children around the world and give them those awful kinds of childhood that you read about. Like, maybe, ‘army brats’ or whatever… So I tried to be fairly stable, and find my creativity from other ways, I suppose.

WAS DRINK A BIG THING FOR YOU, THOUGH? SOME OF THE SONGS ON THAT FIRST RECORD FEEL QUITE… STAINED, IF YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN? THERE WAS AN IDEA OF YOU, AROUND THAT TIME, AS A SORT OF RAYMOND CARVER FIGURE – A SORT OF THROWBACK TO A PARTICULAR KIND OF AMERICAN WRITER. I GUESS I’M ASKING HOW MUCH YOU WERE IMMERSING YOURSELF IN THAT… CLICHÉ?Erm… A fair bit, I suppose. I like beer, I like wine and I like whisky. I always have. I think if I didn’t have my work and my family driving my life it would probably be quite easy for me to become… a lush… But I always have something to do. I just always have a reason… ha ha… I just always have a reason to be sober during the daytime.

HAVE YOU EVER FELT THAT EITHER SIDE OF THAT HAS GOT IN THE WAY OF THE OTHER?Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Do I wish I never took that first drink in 1977 or whenever it was? Yeah, probably. There seem to be some wonderfully rounded characters who’ve never had a drink… But there were certain times when we were touring that things got so repetitious and so dull and you just drink far far too much because of that. I never got to the point, though, where I needed to take uppers before a show to make up for the downers, you know? Where am I at with it right now? I think it’s pretty difficult to eat steak without wine. I think it’s disgusting, ha ha.

ON THAT FIRST SOLO RECORD THERE ARE MENTIONS OF ‘BARS’, ‘SIDEWALKS’, ‘CORNERS’, ‘MOTELS’… THE SEMANTICS ARE OFTEN AMERICAN… Yeah…

… AND LAST YEAR WE TALKED ABOUT RATTLESNAKES BEING A EUROPEAN TAKE ON AN AMERICAN AESTHETIC. I FELT THERE WAS A ROMANTICISM FOR THE STATES ON THAT RECORD WHICH PROBABLY DERIVED FROM BOOKS, FILMS AND PERHAPS TELEVISION. ON THE FIRST SOLO ALBUM IT FELT VERY MUCH ‘FROM WITHIN’, AS I SAID A MOMENT AGO. IT WAS (DESPITE SOME OCCASIONALLY DARK LYRICS) QUITE A LIBERATED ALBUM. I DON’T NECESSARILY MEAN THE PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, BUT WAS IMMERSING YOURSELF IN AMERICA – AND THAT RECORD – AN ESCAPE FROM THE MESS OF THE END OF THE COMMOTIONS? Well, actually, everything including the personal relationships was in a bit of a mess at the end of The Commotions. Everything was in a very maudlin state; I was in a maudlin frame of mind when I was thinking that I might stay in London. When I decided not to stay, when I then found myself in New York all of a sudden… yeah, I was liberated and reinvigorated.

INITIALLY YOU WERE UNSURE ABOUT BEING A SOLO ARTIST…
Yeah, when The Commotions split up I really had no idea whether I even could be a solo artist. I’m sure some people won’t believe me when I say that but it’s true. I didn’t know if I actually had the skill-sets to do it. My job in the band had been quite specific: I was an ideas person and I didn’t do much execution of recording, other than singing and some guitar.

NEW YORK OPENED THAT OUT…
Well, what was wonderful was that I parked myself up in this sort of sub-let studio apartment and started making demos, and I realised that I’d actually learned a massive amount of stuff that I wasn’t aware that I’d learned. I found I could play guitar a little better than I expected, I could program drums, I could write string arrangements well enough to be able to program them on the computer… It was really exciting. My feeling was “Oh my goodness, I can do this” – which was similar to the feeling I had when The Commotions were making RATTLESNAKES, which was “Oh gosh, we’re actually doing it”.

GUITARIST ROBERT QUINE WAS A KEY FIGURE FOR YOU. HE’D BEEN A MEMBER OF RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS AND, BEFORE HIS UNTIMELY DEMISE IN 2004, HE’D ALSO WORKED WITH LOU REED, TOM WAITS, BRIAN ENO, MARC RIBOT… ALL NAMES WHICH WOULD MEAN SOMETHING TO ‘THE IDEA OF’ LLOYD COLE… QUINE CERTAINLY MADE HIS MARK ON THAT FIRST SOLO RECORD OF YOURS; HE ADDED A DISTINCTIVE AND CHARACTERFUL LAYER TO IT, BUT WAS HE IN ON THE WRITING?
He was around while I was doing demos. I met him quite early on after arriving in New York. I can’t quite remember the exact timeline but I’d bumped into Ken Friedman at some point. I think I must have met him when The Commotions were on tour once. He’d been working with The Smiths – I think he said he was their manager but none of us quite believed that could possibly be true… He’s now a mogul in New York, a restaurateur, massively successful. Anyway, Ken said that I’d get on with producer Fred (Maher). Fred was, technically, still a member of Scritti Politti at the time but had just produced the NEW YORK album for Lou Reed. So, y’know… And we got on immediately, and started talking about working together. Fred said “You should meet Quine”, and we set up a lunch and I met Quine in a place called the Elephant And Castle in Greenwich Village. We got on pretty much straight away.

HOW ABOUT MUSICALLY?
Yeah, he came over to the apartment and heard a few of the demos I’d made. In fact he then played a little bit on a couple of the demos. We decided “Yeah, let’s do it”… Literally, I’d had a shortlist of two guitarists that I would want to make a record with… And the list was Robert Quine and Richard Thompson.

WOW… THOMPSON WOULD HAVE BEEN INTERESTING…
Yeah. Both he and Quine equally cantankerous and opinionated. And excellent, of course. It was amazing, really. That first six months was a little bit like that. Everything just fell into place. Then, when we decided to go ahead and make the record and we decided to have an actual band as opposed to overdubbing whatever bits at a time, Blair (Cowan, former keyboard player in The Commotions) was available, as was this kid Matthew Sweet. He was a songwriter who was out of work and needed some work- and he turned out to be a really fantastic bass player… I don’t think we had to settle for a second choice on anything. It was easy, that band and that record.

IT’S A VERY CONFIDENT RECORD, I THINK. AMIDST THE ROCKIER ASPECTS THERE’S A STRING SECTION INTRO ON THE SONG A LONG WAY DOWN. WE TALKED BEFORE ABOUT ANNE DUDLEY’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE COMMOTIONS’ FIRST TWO ALBUMS, AS STRING ARRANGER – I GUESS YOU WERE LOOKING FOR SOME OF THAT GRANDEUR, THAT SWEEPING MELANCHOLY EVEN?
It was more of a serendipitous thing, really – though clearly, from the records I’d made up to that point, I was fond of the sound of orchestras and string sections.

THE STRINGS ON A LONG WAY DOWN FEEL LIKE A SIGNPOST TO THE NEXT ALBUM… OR, RATHER, A SIGNPOST TO HALF OF THE NEXT ALBUM. DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE IS FIFTY PERCENT CLASSIC SONGWRITER AND FIFTY PERCENT ROCK BAND. IN FACT THERE’S CLEAR DEMARCATION – IN THE CASE OF VINYL, EACH TYPE OF SONG LITERALLY HAS ITS OWN SIDE OF THE RECORD…
Yeah. After the first album was finished I’d written a batch of rocky songs and I was very happy with them. But Blair sent me a bunch of demos he’d done, and they were all sounding like Glenn Campbell or Scott Walker records. On the spur of the moment I just said “Let’s do both”. Why not? The first one had been so easy, but I had always felt the next record should be – had to be – something else, something different. So I thought “Let’s make a record half with a band and half with an orchestra”.

IT WAS A BOLD RECORD FOR THAT REASON, I THINK.
It wasn’t really very well thought out, though. In retrospect… well, in retrospect ‘that’s what I had that year’, you know? Those were the songs I had. If I’d wanted to make a different record I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it that year. I’d probably have had to work for another six months in either direction to make a consistent record…

… BUT YOU FELT IT WAS ‘TIME’ FOR A NEW ALBUM?
My career was very much like that. When things were buoyant I wanted to keep working fairly quickly. I wanted to make albums fairly often. I didn’t want to be like The Blue Nile or something. So we just did it and, even though the first album hadn’t actually performed quite as well as Polydor / Polygram would have hoped in terms of sales, it was a success in quite a lot of countries and so my profile was very high (and actually my profile was improved in North America because of it). I said to the record company “I want to do this” and they just said “Yes”… Nobody said to me “You do know the orchestra is going to cost $47,000 for one day, Lloyd?” – no-one discussed that. We just did it.

DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE CONTAINED THE SINGLE SHE’S A GIRL AND I’M A MAN, WHICH WAS A HIT, AND…
… No, no. It wasn’t a hit…

… WELL, I SEEM TO REMEMBER SEEING IT ON VARIOUS TV PROGRAMMES AND HEARING IT ON NATIONAL RADIO – SO, WITH HINDSIGHT, PERHAPS THERE’S JUST THE PERCEPTION THERE THAT IT WAS A HIT…
… Okay, yeah.

I THINK YOU ONCE DESCRIBED THAT SONG BY SAYING SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF “A LITTLE BIT OF MYSOGYNY NEVER DID ANYONE ANY HARM”…
… Ha ha ha…

… I’M SURE THAT YOU WERE BEING IRONIC OR… WELL, I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT YOU WERE BEING. NOT SEXIST, I WOULDN’T HAVE THOUGHT… I HOPE! I GUESS THAT YOU WERE WRITING IN CHARACTER OR SOMETHING?I had a rather lengthy discussion with some very angry Canadian feminists on a radio show about that song, one time – but I don’t think the lyric actually needs any defending. So I said “I’m sorry, I just do not think I’ve got anything to apologise for”. The only potentially sexist aspect of the lyric is that the narrator refers to the female character as ‘a girl’ and not ‘a woman’. That was written that way purely because it sounded better, ha ha… Really, if you wanted to one could argue that there’s an element of sexism to putting women on a pedestal and worshipping them. That’s certainly the type of song that SHE’S A GIRL AND I’M A MAN was…

… IT IS A LOVE SONG.
Yeah. It’s very clear that the narrator is in love with her and still somewhat aghast that she’s in love with him. He’s still dizzy from thinking that a creature as beautiful as she could fall for somebody like him.

WERE YOU WRITING ABOUT YOUR WIFE?
I don’t really write about people, like that, very often. I write characters. The people singing the songs, or who are in the songs, are characters like in books.
BUT THOSE FEELINGS… I THINK WE TOUCHED ON THIS IN LAST YEAR’S PODCAST… THE ELEMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY THERE MAY BE IN YOUR WRITING, AND THE ELEMENT OF FICTION…
Sure, yeah… When they construct characters, to a greater or a larger extent probably every writer has to call upon their own life experiences for realism; to be able to establish the right quirks of behaviour for the characters or to find the right words that the characters would say or… whatever…

… UNLESS THE WRITER IS TOLKIEN…
Ha ha, yeah… Well, I think I’ve only deliberately, specifically, referenced actual specific people about half a dozen times in all of my work. However many songs that is…